Hope Transfusion
Story & Photography by: The Preemptive Love Coalition
November 21, 2008
I met Hussein with his mother, his father, a local doctor and our physical therapist from the Preemptive Love Coalition today when his family came up from the Diyala province of Iraq. The province is still so dangerous and messed up with militias and political problems that Hussein's father, normally a teacher, is unemployed and thus, unable to help his family with the finances necessary to save his son's life. Right now Hussein, his elder sister and their two parents live with their grandparents because they don't have enough money for their own home.
This of course means that they definitely don't have enough money to pay for an expensive, complicated and life-saving surgery abroad. Even if his dad were teaching, his meager government salary would demand his working for a year and a half, and saving all his wages without any expenses, just to be able to afford the total costs (even at a significant discount).
But Hussein doesn't have time for frugality. He's currently two years old, but he might not live to see three - or even two and a half. He really is racing against the clock.
When I met him, he was not just having "a bad day at the doctor's office," as many children do. His tears were tears of pain, not tears of shyness or embarrassment. His condition is deteriorating. His hands that day were an eerie shade of blue, a telltale symptom that his heart was losing its strength to get fresh blood throughout his body.
He has a severe case of Tetralogy of Fallot, a coincidence of four significant congenital heart defects, and an alarmingly common condition in northern Iraq. He has holes where there should be walls and blockage where there should be a free flow of blood. Major veins and arteries essential to healthy circulation are all jumbled up, recycling blood back into the body without any fresh oxygen. And the extra labor all this demands on his heart makes it swell up until it just gives out entirely.
Hussein won't grow out of this. In fact, the compounding trauma over time will just make the problem worse. This is a broken heart that can only be mended by love and a surgeon's skillful hands. A some point however, his heart will get so bad that the surgery itself would kill him because his heart won't be strong enough to take it. From that point on, Hussein and his family will just be waiting for him to die.
This is not just hyped-up telethon talk. Earlier this month, two Iraqi infants died on their way to what could have been life-saving surgery. But the few months that it took for them to climb into the top 25 most urgent cases (out of a current backlog of at least 3,000 Kurdish and Arab children) was just too long for their bodies to hold out. Hope couldn't wait another day.
And so I am sitting, looking at Hussein and his blue hands, wondering if there are enough people with enough love to act before it's too late. Can we really pull together a coalition of the willing to make a preemptive strike before TOF becomes yet another weapon of mass destruction and despair unleashed in Iraq? Will there be people who will enlist themselves in a year-long tour of duty, in a campaign of risk and sacrifice on behalf of children like Hussein?
Hussein's medical file doesn't give me much hope, but the people holding his file do. Here were Kurds, long violently oppressed by an Arab nationalist dictator, doing everything they could to save the life of a precious child of an Arab family from one of Iraq's most infamous hotspots: a province threatening to bring the chaos into the Kurds' backyard again. They understand that there are some problems laser-guided munitions can't solve.
But love can.
These Kurdish friends scrambled to find every penny their organization could contribute so they wouldn't have to turn Hussein away. They pled with me to help find the rest of the money this family needs, and now I'm pleading with you.
Can love strike before it's too late?
This of course means that they definitely don't have enough money to pay for an expensive, complicated and life-saving surgery abroad. Even if his dad were teaching, his meager government salary would demand his working for a year and a half, and saving all his wages without any expenses, just to be able to afford the total costs (even at a significant discount).
But Hussein doesn't have time for frugality. He's currently two years old, but he might not live to see three - or even two and a half. He really is racing against the clock.
When I met him, he was not just having "a bad day at the doctor's office," as many children do. His tears were tears of pain, not tears of shyness or embarrassment. His condition is deteriorating. His hands that day were an eerie shade of blue, a telltale symptom that his heart was losing its strength to get fresh blood throughout his body.
He has a severe case of Tetralogy of Fallot, a coincidence of four significant congenital heart defects, and an alarmingly common condition in northern Iraq. He has holes where there should be walls and blockage where there should be a free flow of blood. Major veins and arteries essential to healthy circulation are all jumbled up, recycling blood back into the body without any fresh oxygen. And the extra labor all this demands on his heart makes it swell up until it just gives out entirely.
Hussein won't grow out of this. In fact, the compounding trauma over time will just make the problem worse. This is a broken heart that can only be mended by love and a surgeon's skillful hands. A some point however, his heart will get so bad that the surgery itself would kill him because his heart won't be strong enough to take it. From that point on, Hussein and his family will just be waiting for him to die.
This is not just hyped-up telethon talk. Earlier this month, two Iraqi infants died on their way to what could have been life-saving surgery. But the few months that it took for them to climb into the top 25 most urgent cases (out of a current backlog of at least 3,000 Kurdish and Arab children) was just too long for their bodies to hold out. Hope couldn't wait another day.
And so I am sitting, looking at Hussein and his blue hands, wondering if there are enough people with enough love to act before it's too late. Can we really pull together a coalition of the willing to make a preemptive strike before TOF becomes yet another weapon of mass destruction and despair unleashed in Iraq? Will there be people who will enlist themselves in a year-long tour of duty, in a campaign of risk and sacrifice on behalf of children like Hussein?
Hussein's medical file doesn't give me much hope, but the people holding his file do. Here were Kurds, long violently oppressed by an Arab nationalist dictator, doing everything they could to save the life of a precious child of an Arab family from one of Iraq's most infamous hotspots: a province threatening to bring the chaos into the Kurds' backyard again. They understand that there are some problems laser-guided munitions can't solve.
But love can.
These Kurdish friends scrambled to find every penny their organization could contribute so they wouldn't have to turn Hussein away. They pled with me to help find the rest of the money this family needs, and now I'm pleading with you.
Can love strike before it's too late?
